4,669 results match your criteria: "University of Wellington[Affiliation]"

Background: Breastfeeding initiation and continuation rates are shaped by complex and interrelated determinants across individual, interpersonal, community, organisational, and policy spheres. Young mothers, however, face a double burden of stigma, being perceived as immature and incompetent in their mothering and breastfeeding abilities. In this study, we aimed to understand the experiences of young mothers who exclusively breastfed for six months and beyond and explore their experiences of stigma and active resistance through social media.

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The Synthesis and Reactivity of Naphthoquinonynes.

Angew Chem Int Ed Engl

April 2024

Department of Chemistry, University of Liverpool, Crown Street, Liverpool, L69 7ZD, United Kingdom.

The first systematic exploration of the synthesis and reactivity of naphthoquinonynes is described. Routes to two regioisomeric Kobayashi-type naphthoquinonyne precursors have been developed, and the reactivity of the ensuing 6,7- and 5,6-aryne intermediates has been investigated. Remarkably, these studies have revealed that a broad range of cycloadditions, nucleophile additions and difunctionalizations can be achieved while maintaining the integrity of the highly sensitive quinone unit.

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The evidence for the use of Augmented Reality (AR) in treating specific phobias has been growing. However, issues of accessibility persist, especially in developing countries. The current study examined a novel, but relatively simple therapist guided smartphone-based AR Exposure Treatment (ARET) of spider phobia.

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In drug discovery, the search for new and effective medications is often hindered by concerns about toxicity. Numerous promising molecules fail to pass the later phases of drug development due to strict toxicity assessments. This challenge significantly increases the cost, time, and human effort needed to discover new therapeutic molecules.

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A large variety of dietary phytochemicals has been shown to improve thrombosis and stroke outcomes in preclinical studies. Many of these compounds feature electrophilic functionalities that potentially undergo covalent addition to the sulfhydryl side chain of cysteine residues within proteins. However, the impact of such covalent modifications on the platelet activity and function remains unclear.

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Early-life stress can lead to sustained alterations in regional resting-state brain functions, but the underlying molecular mechanism remains unclear. Stress can also induce sustained changes in epigenetic modifications across brain regions, which are not limited to a few genes; rather, they often tend to produce global levels of change. The functional implication of these changes also remains to be elucidated.

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Delay discounting occurs when a reward loses value as a function of delay. Episodic future thinking (EFT) reliably decreases delay discounting. EFT may share cognitive features with recalling episodic memories such as constructive episodic simulation.

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Objective: The Glucose in Well Babies (GLOW) Study showed that there are two phases of low glucose concentrations in healthy newborn infants: an initial phase in which plasma concentrations of ketones are low; and a second phase in which low glucose concentrations are accompanied by elevated concentrations of ketones. The implications of these two phases for the brain differ depending on whether ketones are available as alternative substrate for brain metabolism. The purpose of this study was to estimate the duration of these two phases of neonatal low glucose concentrations in 66 healthy breastfed newborns from the GLOW Study during the first 5 days of life.

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Exploring long-term outcomes of a peer support programme for parents* of children with disability in Australia.

Child Care Health Dev

March 2024

Discipline of Occupational Therapy, Department of Community and Clinical Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Peer support groups can offer parents of children with disability, positive well-being outcomes. Peer support groups not only provide opportunities for connections with others with similar experiences but also provide resources and information, emotional support, a sense of belonging and may help reduce stress and isolation. Peer support groups are an established form of support existing within family centred practice.

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Objectives: The research examined the motivation to integrate and perceived discrimination as antecedents of cultural identity styles, the cognitive and behavioral strategies that bicultural individuals use for decision making in managing and maintaining their ethnic and national identities. Two major cultural identity styles have been distinguished: the alternating identity style (AIS, changing cultural identities depending on the circumstances) and the hybrid identity style (HIS, blending selected aspects of these identities in a unique way). Based on earlier cross-sectional research, we tested the hypotheses that the motivation to integrate would predict greater use of both styles and that perceived discrimination would predict greater use of the AIS, but not the HIS, over time.

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NKT Agonist-Antigen Conjugates as Cancer Vaccines.

Crit Rev Oncog

March 2024

Ferrier Research Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, Lower Hutt 5010, New Zealand; Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery, Auckland 1010, New Zealand.

Natural killer T (NKT) cells are a population of innate-like T cells capable of enhancing both innate and adaptive immune responses. Co-delivering an NKT cell agonist and antigen can provide molecular signals to antigen-presenting cells, such as dendritic and B cells, that facilitate strong antigen-specific adaptive immune responses. Accordingly, there has been a significant number of developmental NKT cell-dependent vaccine therapies developed, particularly in the last decade, with many incorporating cancer antigens.

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RNA ligases are important enzymes in molecular biology and are highly useful for the manipulation and analysis of nucleic acids, including adapter ligation in next-generation sequencing of microRNAs. Thermophilic RNA ligases belonging to the RNA ligase 3 family are gaining attention for their use in molecular biology, for example a thermophilic RNA ligase from Methanobacterium thermoautotrophicum is commercially available for the adenylation of nucleic acids. Here we extensively characterise a newly identified RNA ligase from the thermophilic archaeon Palaeococcus pacificus (PpaRnl).

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A clinical utility evaluation of dual HIV/Syphilis point-of-care tests in non-clinical settings for screening for HIV and syphilis in men who have sex with men.

BMC Infect Dis

February 2024

Department of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research (SRH), including UNDP-UNFPA-UNICEF-WHO-World Bank Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction (HRP), World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland.

Background: Dual point-of-care tests (POCTs) for the simultaneous detection of antibodies to HIV and syphilis have been developed. Since community-based organisations (CBO) are effective providers of HIV and syphilis testing among men who have sex with men (MSM), evaluation of the utility of these dual tests at CBO testing services is a high priority. The aim of this study is to determine the feasibility of performing dual HIV-syphilis POCT testing among both users and providers at these non-clinical sites.

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Freshwater fish biodiversity and abundance are decreasing globally. The drivers of decline are primarily anthropogenic; however, the causative links between disturbances and fish community change are complex and challenging to investigate. We used a suite of sedimentary DNA methods (droplet digital PCR and metabarcoding) and traditional paleolimnological approaches, including pollen and trace metal analysis, ITRAX X-ray fluorescence and hyperspectral core scanning to explore changes in fish abundance and drivers over 1390 years in a small lake.

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Synthesis and Reactivity of Discrete Europium(II) Hydride Complexes.

Chemistry

May 2024

School of Chemical and Physical Sciences/Ferrier Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, 6012, New Zealand.

The bulky β-diketiminate ligand frameworks [BDI] and [BDI] (BDI=[HC{C(Me)N-Dipp/Ar}] (Dipp=2,6-diisopropylphenyl (Dipp); Ar=2,6-dicyclohexylphyenyl (DCHP) or 2,4,6-tricyclohexylphyenyl (TCHP)) have been developed for the kinetic stabilisation of the first europium (II) hydride complexes, [(BDI)Eu(μ-H)], [(BDI)Eu(μ-H)] and [(BDI)Eu(μ-H)], respectively. These complexes represent the first step beyond the current lanthanide(II) hydrides that are all based on ytterbium. Tuning the steric profile of β-diketiminate ligands from a symmetrical to unsymmetrical disposition, enhanced solubility and stability in the solution-state.

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Tuatara are the sole extant species in the reptile order Rhynchocephalia. They are ecologically and evolutionarily unique, having been isolated geographically for ~84 million years and evolutionarily from their closest living relatives for ~250 million years. Here we report the tuatara gut bacterial community for the first time.

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Short empirically-supported scales or individual items are preferred in comprehensive surveys, brief screeners, and experience sampling studies. To that end, we examined the Short Almost Perfect Scale (SAPS) to evaluate empirical support for the interchangeability of items to measure perfectionistic strivings (Standards) and perfectionistic concerns (Discrepancy). Based on a large and diverse sample ( = 1,103) and tests of tau-equivalence (equal factor loadings) for each respective set of items, Study 1 advanced a subset of SAPS items to measure Standards (2 items) and Discrepancy (3 items).

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Aims: Cervical cancer remains a burden within Aotearoa New Zealand, with 2022 screening rates sitting 12.7% below target. The National Cervical Screening Programme has changed to primary human papillomavirus (HPV) testing for all screen-eligible people, with the aim for home self-testing.

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Importance: Studies suggest a higher risk of schizophrenia diagnoses in Black vs White Americans, yet a systematic investigation of disparities that include other ethnoracial groups and multiple outcomes on the psychosis continuum is lacking.

Objective: To identify ethnoracial risk variation in the US across 3 psychosis continuum outcomes (ie, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, clinical high risk for psychosis [CHR-P], and psychotic symptoms [PSs] and psychotic experiences [PEs]).

Data Sources: PubMed, PsycINFO and Embase were searched up to December 2022.

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Background: Barriers to accessing hospice and palliative care have been well studied. An important yet less researched area is why people approaching the end-of-life decline a referral when they are offered services. This review focused on synthesising literature on patients in the last months of life due to a cancer diagnosis who have declined a referral to end-of-life care.

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Many contemporary theories of memory assume that everyone automatically stores temporal contextual information about all types of encountered information, yet most studies on this topic have used words and ignored individual differences. Five experiments accumulated evidence that explicit storage of temporal context information does not appear to occur automatically for all people and types of memoranda. We collected judgments of temporal position (memory-for-when) for words (Experiments 1 & 3), faces (Experiments 2A, 3, 4, and 5), and classrooms (Experiments 2B & 3).

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The extended neural architecture of human attachment: An fMRI coordinate-based meta-analysis of affiliative studies.

Neurosci Biobehav Rev

April 2024

Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics Unit, The D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; IDOR - Pioneer Science Initiative, São Paulo, Brazil.

Article Synopsis
  • Functional imaging studies show that brain areas important for social cognition are linked with ancient brain structures, helping form human attachment and emotions.
  • Recent advancements with fMRI have helped researchers better understand how the brain responds to different attachment figures, but past analyses faced challenges like low statistical power.
  • This meta-analysis of 79 fMRI studies highlights important brain regions related to social bonding and motivation, providing new insights into the neural mechanisms of human affiliation and expanding the known attachment circuitry to include uniquely human brain areas.
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A common approach to assess the nature of energy conversion in a classical fluid or plasma is to compare power densities of the various possible energy conversion mechanisms. A leading research area is quantifying energy conversion for systems that are not in local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE), as is common in a number of fluid and plasma systems. Here we introduce the "higher-order nonequilibrium term" (HORNET) effective power density, which quantifies the rate of change of departure of a phase space density from LTE.

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